Electronic Book Review - dave ciccoriccohttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/tags/dave-ciccoricco
enTending the Garden Plot: Victory Garden and Operation Enduring...http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/internetnation/operational
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Dave Ciccoricco</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-10-19</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>“Oboyoboy just when we’d wrung the last nostalgia from that Desert Storm, by golly <span class="lightEmphasis">WE GET TO DO IT AGAIN</span>!” <cite id="note_1" class="note">From the node, “Balanced Coverage,” in <span class="work-title">Victory Garden</span> (1991).</cite> One of the many narrative voices of <span class="booktitle">Victory Garden</span> comments derisively here on the “media men” who are “just about falling over themselves with crisis-lust,” unsated by the fact that they have just broadcast a war with the highest quality production values in history. The speaker refers to the dual crises of Hurricane Bob and the Moscow coup in August of 1991, but the reference may just as well be to something that was yet to happen. Written and published in the months following the United States’ 1991 war with Iraq (Operation Desert Storm), Stuart Moulthrop’s <span class="work-title">Victory Garden</span> is again timely in the aftermath of Operation Enduring Freedom, the United States-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Although more often discussed for its contravention of a fixed and singular plot, <span class="work-title">Victory Garden</span> also demonstrates how a narrative in network form can accommodate a political critique.</p>
<h2>Multi-purpose gardens</h2>
<p>Some early critics were quick to see <span class="work-title">Victory Garden</span> as rooted in a leftist political ideology, (See, for example, <a href="http://www.itu.dk/people/klastrup/dischap2.html" class="outbound">Klastrup 1997</a>), but Moulthrop’s narrative is not unequivocally leftist. Its political orientation in a sense mirrors its material structure, for neither sits on a stable axis. In fact, Moulthrop is more interested in questioning how a palette of information technologies contributes to - or, for those who adopt the strong reading, determines - the formation of political ideologies. In addition to popular forms of information dissemination, this palette would include hypertext technology, which reflexively questions its own role in disseminating information as the narrative of <span class="work-title">Victory Garden</span> progresses.</p>
<p>Citing Sven Birkerts’ observation that attitudes toward information technologies do not map neatly onto the familiar liberal/conservative axis, Moulthrop writes:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Newt Gingrich and Timothy Leary have both been advocates of the Internet… I am interested less in old ideological positions than in those now emerging, which may be defined more by attitudes toward information and interpretive authority than by traditional political concerns. (Moulthrop 1997, 674 n4)</p>
<p>The politics of <span class="work-title">Victory Garden</span>, much like its plot, do not harbor foregone conclusions. In a 1994 interview, Moulthrop says it “is a story about war and the futility of war, and about its nobility at the same time” (Dunn 1994). The formulation is perhaps nowhere more clear than in the work’s title. Previous discussions of the title, such as in <a href="http://www.jyu.fi/~koskimaa/thesis/chapter6.htm" class="outbound">Koskimaa</a> (2000), focus on its indebtedness to Borges’ short fiction, “The Garden of the Forking Paths,” which is well known to have planted the seeds of Moulthrop’s <span class="booktitle">Garden</span>. But a victory garden refers specifically to World War II and the widespread practice, initially proposed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1941, of planting gardens on residential or community property so that precious resources could be diverted to soldiers stationed overseas. While commercial farmers supplied the army, victory gardens supplemented dinner tables on the home front. By 1943, over 20 million residential gardens were producing an estimated 8 million tons of food, which amounted to nearly half of all of the fresh vegetables consumed nationwide. <cite id="note_2" class="note">See “<a href="http://www.victoryseeds.com/TheVictoryGarden/index.html" class="work-title">Victory Gardening in America</a>,” <span class="journaltitle">Victory Seed Company</span> multimedia. </cite> Cultivating vegetables also cultivated morale, and the victory garden stands as a symbol of the tremendous civilian support for the war effort. Thus, not only are the gardens credited with helping to win the war, they also cap one of the most romantic periods in U.S. military history.</p>
<p>A more sardonic reading, however, equates Moulthrop’s title with the many “gardens of remembrance” marking the places of human sacrifice that act as prelude to victory. The Normandy American Cemetery, where over 9,000 soldiers were laid to rest, is one such reminder of great victory and great loss. There, inscribed on memorial walls, a “Garden of the Missing” lists names of over 1,500 soldiers whose remains were not located or identified. In discussing the overview map of <span class="work-title">Victory Garden</span>, Raine Koskimaa follows Robert Coover in equating the graphic to either a garden or a graveyard - “the garden referring to [the Borges story], the graveyard to Gulf War casualties” (<a href="http://www.jyu.fi/~koskimaa/thesis/chapter6.htm" class="outbound">Koskimaa 2000</a>). The graveyard interpretation rightly gestures toward an understanding of “victory” as a darkly ironic one, perhaps necessarily so in an age where irony comes easily for the postmodernist, or indeed the post-nationalist, who is simply unable to romanticize war. It is a gruesome irony that plays itself out yet again during the coalition’s occupation of Iraq after the second war. In May 2004, reports emerged from Fallujah of local volunteers having difficulty burying civilian casualties amid the ongoing fighting. According to one report, the end of a month-long siege means that a woman who was killed while she attempted to flee the city can be moved to the municipal football stadium for burial; her husband has already been buried “in the garden of the house next door.” <cite id="note_3" class="note">(see Glantz, Aaron. “<span class="work-title">Victory Rises Above a Mass Grave</span>,” <span class="journaltitle">IPS - Inter Press News Service</span>, May 3, 2004.</cite> At once romantic and horrific, Moulthrop’s title makes an ambivalent - and highly emotive - comment on the audience of war.</p>
<p>The names of Moulthrop’s characters are equally suggestive. Discussions of the characters have focused on their intertextual relationship to the characters in Borges’ fiction, a relationship that is already established. <cite id="note_4" class="note">Koskimaa (2000) discusses the correspondence of names.</cite> But the name of one character, Emily, suggests political and historical significance beyond Borges. In a narrative of prismatic possibility, Emily is (in some readings) subject to an incredibly unlikely fate: An Iraqi Scud missile manages to breach the reputedly unassailable U.S. Patriot missile defense system and strike her barracks in Riyadh. It is a turn of events Emily herself would never have imagined. In a letter to her friend, professor Thea Agnew, she writes,</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Do I feel any anxiety about my own ass out here? No more than I do when we forget and let Boris do the driving. On second thought, I’m a lot less worried than when Boris is driving.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">You never know. We’ve got a lieutenant here who’s an astrophysicist back in the real world. Lieutenant says if your <cite id="note_5" class="note">These are Emily’s errors, indicative of hastily written letters. The font used to present them is also suggestive of typewritten documents, with signatures that appear handwritten.</cite> in a rear posting like ours your more likely to get clobbered by a sizeable meteor… (“I’m OK”)</p>
<p>The name “Emily” is a testament to military improbability. During WWII, the Japanese planned covert operations to attack the west coast of the United States by launching a seaplane from a submarine. The plane was to fly inland and drop incendiary bombs on the heavily forested regions of Oregon, which, it was hoped, would cause massive forest fires that would spread to the cities. There were two raids in 1942, but neither succeeded in starting fires or causing collateral damage. The mountain on which the first bomb landed on mainland United States is named Mt. Emily - located 10 miles northeast of Brookings, Oregon. <cite id="note_6" class="note">See Chuck Woodbury, “<span class="work-title">World War II air raid of Oregon was a real bomb</span>” in <span class="journaltitle">Out West</span>, #11, July 1990.</cite> Thus, if the chance of a Scud missile hitting a mail sorter stationed in Riyadh would seem unlikely, so too would the chance of the Japanese bombing Oregon.</p>
<p>In a scene that follows one year from Emily’s presumed death, Thea’s new partner (who is, in a convolution of plot that can easily go unnoticed, also Moulthrop’s narrator) <cite id="note_7" class="note">Robert Selig discusses this development in “<span class="work-title">The Endless Reading of Fiction</span>” (<span class="journaltitle">Contemporary Literature</span>, 41.4, pp. 642-59).</cite> helps her pack for a trip to London:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">I pick up the big calendar we salvaged from the bottom of the heap and square it up neatly on Thea’s desk, thinking, now you’re ready to face the future. Only then do I realize that it’s last year’s calendar, untouched since February 1991. I start to say something but then my eyes catch another detail. Using a razorblade, someone has sliced the square for February 26 out of the page. The cut was deep, taking several other days with it.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">I say nothing. (“And Then Again”)</p>
<p>The passage establishes a historical parallel. According to a U.S. Department of Defense paper, in the early evening of February 25, 1991, Iraq launched one Scud missile toward Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. <cite id="note_8" class="note">See “<span class="work-title">I</span><a href="http://www.iraqwatch.org/government/US/Pentagon/dodscud.htm" class="work-title">nformation Paper: Iraq’s Scud Ballistic Missiles</a>.” Released July 25, 2000 by the United States Department of Defense. </cite> The Scud broke up on reentry and showered a U.S. housing compound with debris. The warhead, however, struck a warehouse serving as an army barracks in the Dhahran suburb of Al Khobar. The explosion and resulting fire killed 28 soldiers and injured 100, half of them seriously. This single incident caused more combat casualties than any other in Operation Desert Storm. February 26, then, marks the day Thea would have received news of Emily’s death.</p>
<p>More than a matter of referential synchronicity in a work of historical fiction, the connection is crucial to <span class="work-title">Victory Garden</span> as political critique. The same paper, citing an MIT report by the Center of International Studies (Lewis, Fetter, and Gronlund. “Casualties and Damage from Scud Attacks in the 1991 Gulf War,” Appendix, Center for International Studies, MIT, Cambridge, Mass., March 1993), faults the Patriot defense system for failing to intercept the missile: “One Patriot battery on Dhahran airfield was not operational and another nearby did not track the Scud, apparently because of a software problem.” Much controversy has surrounded the efficacy of the Patriot missile systems since their popular introduction in the first Gulf War. Ironically, much of the problem lies not with their own advanced software, but the relative simplicity and crudeness of their target. Scuds are unpredictable; they often tumble or break up mid-flight. In short, they are difficult to track because they are so “low-tech.” An independent report by the House Government Operations subcommittee on National Security (led by Professor Theodore Postol at MIT) determined that their “kill rate” was in fact lower than 10 percent and possibly zero percent, a dramatic decrease from the 80 percent (in Saudi Arabia) and 50 percent (in Israel) initially reported by the U.S. Army. <cite id="note_9" class="note">See Jeffrey St. Clair, “<span class="work-title">Patriot Gore: The Fatal Flaws in the Patriot Missile System</span>” in <a href="http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles4/StClair_Patriot-Flaws.htm"><span class="journaltitle">Dissident Voice</span></a>, April 19, 2003. </cite> The “software problem” appears to be chronic, and indeed deadly. In the second war in the Gulf, a Patriot missile engaged and brought down a RAF plane returning from an air raid on Basra, killing the two pilots. The media widely reported the event, but the tragedy was by no means an isolated instance of the technology - a <span class="lightEmphasis">defense</span> system no less - unintentionally turned against its users. <cite id="note_10" class="note">St. Clair (2003).</cite> The implication of <span class="work-title">Victory Garden</span> is clear: if technology is to determine our greatest military victories it will also determine our greatest failures.</p>
<h2>what are You looking at?</h2>
<p>In his essay <a href="../firstperson/molecular" class="internal">From Work to Play</a> (2003), written nearly 12 years after the publication of <span class="work-title">Victory Garden</span>, Moulthrop considers the political implications of immersion in art, and the correlated condition of media transparency. For him, when it comes to real-world conflict, it may be imperative that a medium insist on calling attention to itself and, conversely, that a reader insist on calling attention to the medium. He writes, “It may happen that in refusing the transparency of media we make ourselves better able to interrogate the nature of the conflict, perhaps even to understand more clearly what we mean when we talk about war and other deadly games” (Moulthrop 2003). From this point of view, a reflexive medium enables us to better interrogate and better understand what it carries; that is, the view of the “screener” (to borrow Mireille Rosello’s term for the hypertext user) becomes more complete and comprehensive than that of the reader who is completely immersed.</p>
<p>The thematic framework of <span class="work-title">Victory Garden</span> speaks to immersion in this regard. Emily, for example, is the only character situated in the military establishment and, geographically, in the Middle East - the only character literally immersed in a “deadly game.” But the narrative foregrounds her perspective in another way: even though her letters to her friends back home suggest a first-hand account of war, she appears well aware of her own limited view: “…spose you have to say what that reporter said about the Vietnam | the only position you can have ON the thing is your position IN it” (“Opinion”). Emily does not see herself as “in” the war but rather as removed from it. Furthermore, as a mail clerk, she is part of the apparatus of print, processing information that is much slower, much heavier, and arguably much easier to regulate and censor than electronic mail. She is oddly detached and isolated not only from her friends at home but also from the war to which she was sent. Thus, she is neither “IN” war’s reality nor inundated, like her psychologically unstable lover Boris Urquhart, by its mediation.</p>
<p>Emily’s “view” takes an ironic turn when the lights go out in her Riyadh mailroom following the likely missile attack (“Blackout,” “.”). In some readings, a black screen suggests the darkness that befalls Emily and the members of her company in the mailroom; in others, the blackness is followed by a node that displays a shattered screen, suggesting that Emily and her company have been hit and likely killed by the strike (“…and…”). We just don’t know for sure what happens to Emily at this point. Instead, one is left with Moulthrop’s trademark “breakdown” - the crash that reminds us what we’re actually looking at, and reminds us of the fragility of our own point of view, in both the physical and ideological sense. If the screen is what allows the paradoxical immersion of the passive viewer, then Emily’s friends back home, caught in a continual 24-hour news cycle replete with facts, opinions, and images, would seem immersed in much the same way as the reader. But as a hypertext, <span class="work-title">Victory Garden</span> brings the war to our personal screens in a way that suggests a movement from consumption to participation. It asks that we make use of the network form to interrogate the passivity associated with the behind-the-screen perspective.</p>
<h2>Garden Care</h2>
<p>If the reader’s position mirrors the position of Emily’s friends, then the narrative is designed to evoke a genuine concern for Emily’s welfare. Thus, the political critique implicit in <span class="work-title">Victory Garden</span> arises not only from the instrumental engagement with an unfamiliar reading/writing technology, but also from an empathetic identification with the characters - an immersion in the storyworld. At the same time, if <span class="lightEmphasis">immersion</span> implies a lack of critical distance, passive consumption, or even naïveté, then it would appear to be more pernicious than productive. Indeed, the movement away from narrative forms goes hand in hand with a resistance to transparency, especially for those, Moulthrop included, who take issue with the notion that a successful storytelling technology is an invisible storytelling technology.</p>
<p>Moulthrop cites Janet Murray, who claims that “[e]ventually all successful storytelling technologies become ‘transparent’: we lose consciousness of the medium and see neither print nor film but only the power of the story itself” (Murray 1997, cited in Moulthrop 2003). For him, the same potential loss of consciousness of the medium is all the more reason to consider “turn[ing] away from storytelling as the prime agenda of art” (Moulthrop 2003). True, it is by no means apparent that medial transparency is or should be the measure of a successful narrative. But the case against immersion in narrative might well be overstated. The practice is in large part a reactionary one, attributable to the emergence of technologies that promise (or <span class="lightEmphasis">threaten</span>, depending on your stance) to realize transparency not in an eventual process of cultural acclimation, but rather in one immediate stroke of technological innovation, be it via glove and goggles or an as yet uncreated “holodeck.” But immersion theories tend toward extremes; they are often either (1) too negative or (2) too broad. Of the negative conception, Marie-Laure Ryan writes,</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Immersion in a virtual world is viewed by most theorists of postmodernism as a passive subjection to the authority of the world-designer - a subjection exemplified by the entrapment of tourists in the self-enclosed virtual realities of theme parks or vacation resorts (where the visitor’s only freedom is the freedom to use his credit card). (Ryan 1994)</p>
<p>It is clear that not many scholars, theorists, and critics actually “lose consciousness” of their medium - at least not those doing their job - and many reader/viewers would be quick to point out that the opposite of self-consciousness is not necessarily naiveté; rather, one indulges in something more akin to a “self-conscious immersion” - or a <span class="lightEmphasis">willing</span> suspension of disbelief. But it would seem too that any reading or viewing that occurs in a remotely critical mode (beyond but not exclusive to that of popular entertainment) would yield a consideration of not only a story but also its story-producing mechanisms. After all, as countless theorists of the postmodern have pointed out, we live in a society in which artifacts both cultural and commercial insist on calling attention to themselves, to their artifice, whether it be a work of kinetic poetry online or the billboard down the road. <cite id="note_11">The billboard down the road from me: an ad for a new lighting company where one of the three functional lights illuminating it dangles limp and broken. It reads, “Need a Lighting Fix?”</cite> Furthermore, where concerns arise over those who do not read or view media in a critical way, those concerns should be met by the scholars, theorists, and critics who do: at a time when we are increasingly convinced by the power of digitally mediated interactions and simulations to condition or train certain “unthinking” reflex behaviors (see Simon Penny on the <a href="../firstperson/machanimate" class="internal">Representation, Enaction, and the Ethics of Simulation</a> in <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span>), there is all the more reason for pedagogy to play its role in training thought. In any case, one has to be realistic about what it means to be “immersed” in synthetic realities - perhaps we should give more credit (not the financial kind) to the visitor of virtual worlds.</p>
<p>Any theory of immersion, abstracted from a given context, moreover suffers in its breadth. Common to the discourse of immersion theory is the notion that the realist novelist and the virtual reality environment designer pursue the same goal - the disappearance of the medium. But a historicizing continuum of transparent media is suspect when it conflates immersion in <span class="lightEmphasis">representation</span> (as in a Victorian novel), which is largely a cognitive phenomenon, with immersion in <span class="lightEmphasis">simulation</span> (as in a VR environment), which employs variables - visual, auditory, haptic - that encourage a corporeal immersion. Lev Manovich (2001, 113) makes the same distinction based on one’s bodily position in relation to the medium: where a representational form, such as a painting, exists in a physical location separate from the embodied viewer, “in the simulation tradition, the spectator exists in a single coherent space - the physical space and the virtual space that continues it.”</p>
<p>Hypertext narratives, such as <span class="work-title">Victory Garden</span>, would sit somewhere in the middle of this continuum. On the one hand, they betray their historical contingency in their heavy reliance on (an arguably conservative) narrative poetics. On the other hand, they signal a moment in literary history when an age-old cultural form opens itself to the influence of digital aesthetics. Such narratives constitute a telling moment in literary history, regardless of how momentary they may prove to be. Indeed, those who tell stories with computers do not need to call attention to the techniques and conventions of their medium, as did Brecht for theater. Digital fictions impede transparency by virtue of their unfamiliarity - their literary machinery is already strange enough.</p>
<p>But encased in the unique literary machinery of digital fictions are the unique voices of its characters, who often speak at and of the “fork in the road” where “traditional narrative interests” diverge from those invested in the play of interaction and simulation (Moulthrop 2003). There is still plenty of reason to listen to and interpret these voices - at least until a crack in our screen suggests otherwise.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">______</p>
<h2>Works Cited</h2>
<p>Dunn, John. 1994. “Hyperfiction Moulthrop’s computer novel weaves a web of alternative endings.” <span class="journaltitle">Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine Online</span>. summer 1994. <a href="http://gtalumni.org/news/magazine/sum94/fiction.html" class="outbound">http://gtalumni.org/news/magazine/sum94/fiction.html</a></p>
<p>Koskimaa, Raine. 2000. <span class="booktitle">Digital Literature: From Text to Hypertext and Beyond</span>. Chapter 6. <a href="http://www.cc.jyu.fi/~koskimaa/thesis/chapter6.htm" class="outbound">http://www.cc.jyu.fi/~koskimaa/thesis/chapter6.htm</a></p>
<p>Manovich, Lev. 2001. <span class="booktitle">The Language of New Media</span>. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.</p>
<p>Moulthrop, Stuart. 2003. ” <a href="../firstperson/molecular" class="internal">From Work to Play</a>,” <span class="journaltitle">electronic book review</span>, December 2003.</p>
<p>______. 1997. “Pushing Back: Living and Writing in Broken Space” in <span class="journaltitle">Modern Fiction Studies</span> 43.3 (651-674).</p>
<p>______. 1991. <span class="booktitle">Victory Garden</span>. Watertown, Mass.: Eastgate Systems.</p>
<p>Ryan, Marie-Laure. 1994. “Immersion versus Interactivity: Virtual Reality and Literary Theory.” <span class="journaltitle">Postmodern Culture</span>, September 1994. (available: <a href="http://www.humanities.uci.edu/mposter/syllabi/readings/ryan.html" class="outbound">http://www.humanities.uci.edu/mposter/syllabi/readings/ryan.html</a>)</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/ciccoricco">ciccoricco</a>, <a href="/tags/dave-ciccoricco">dave ciccoricco</a>, <a href="/tags/moulthrop">moulthrop</a>, <a href="/tags/stuart-moulthrop">Stuart Moulthrop</a>, <a href="/tags/victory-garden">victory garden</a>, <a href="/tags/network">network</a>, <a href="/tags/fiction">fiction</a>, <a href="/tags/narrative">narrative</a>, <a href="/tags/politic">politic</a>, <a href="/tags/ryan">ryan</a>, <a href="/tags/marie-laure">marie-laure</a>, <a href="/tags/manovich">manovich</a>, <a href="/tags/military">military</a>, <a href="/tags/training">training</a>, <a href="/tags/technology">technology</a>, <a href="/tags/iraq">iraq</a>, <a href="/tags/desert-storm">desert storm</a>, <a href="/tags/enduring-freedom">enduring freedom</a>, <a href="/tags/wwii">wwii</a>, <a href="/tags/scud">scud</a>, <a href="/tags/patriot">patriot</a>, <a href="/tags/missile">missile</a>, <a href="/tags/immersion">immersion</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1103 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/internetnation/operational#commentsWhat Remains in Liam's Goinghttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/endconstruction/dialectical
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Dave Ciccoricco</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2003-11-03</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>“In <span class="booktitle">Liam’s Going</span>, Joyce - the foremost American author working in the new electronic artform of ‘hypertext’ - has returned to his storytelling roots.” So goes the blurb on the overleaf of Joyce’s most recent novel. The comment resonates with something like the relief felt after an exhilarating but somewhat nauseating amusement park ride. Joyce has addressed the inevitable question of his “return” to print in an online interview with Mary Cavill in <a class="outbound" href="http://TrAce.ntu.ac.uk/showcase/index.cfm?article=33"><span class="journaltitle">TrAce</span></a> :</p>
<p class="longQuotation">I do not see myself as returning to the novel in the sense of having left it, but rather returning in the way you return to what has never left you, like the family or the place where you grew up. (<span class="journaltitle">TrAce</span>)</p>
<p>For an artist informed by a hypertextual aesthetic that, digital or not, anchors itself in <a class="internal" href="/thread/endconstruction/notanend">recurrence and return</a>, there is no “from and to, only the to and fro, the swirl and flow, of clouds” (<span class="journaltitle">TrAce</span>). A more productive distinction here arises not so much with the notion of returning, but rather with that of storytelling itself. After all, since when was the novel about telling a story?</p>
<h2>I. Space for Stories or Time for Patterns</h2>
<p>Joyce arranges the text in chapters alternating the point of view of Noah Williams the lawyer and Cathleen Hogan Williams the poet, husband and wife. From these two poles of perspective emerges a procession of memory and desire, the same “cruel mix” that sets T.S. Eliot’s most famous poem in motion, and the same twist of consciousness that Brian McHale, in contrast to the ontological preoccupations of much contemporary fiction, has described as a “classic” epistemological theme. Here, the agent of change is Liam, Cathleen and Noah’s only child, who is leaving home for his first year of college. His imminent absence forces both Cathleen and Noah to contemplate not only what they have and what they will bring into the future, but also what and who they may have left behind long ago. At one point late in the novel, Noah considers the possible futures for his son, recalling his own past in turn. The act assumes a marked congruency for him, as if the two planes of possibility somehow overlap - the many paths that exist unrealized for Liam overlaying many of the paths that remain unrealized in Noah’s own past. “There was a pattern here,” he thinks, “what was a story if it wasn’t that?” (194).</p>
<p>Story and pattern have a complex relationship. The conflation of the two comes easily enough given that the line, in the most basic sense, forms a pattern when it doubles back on itself. Story becomes cycle - the archetypal snake with its tail in its mouth. We might even describe the two as consubstantial given that language can constitute - literally give substance to - both story and pattern. The two, however, are not synonymous. A story connotes progression; a pattern connotes repetition. Story typically concerns itself with the representational quality of language, whereas pattern concerns itself with non-representational components. The same claim, of course, is complicated by any text that aspires to represent - or refer to - nothing other than itself. Conversely, patterns can be said to carry “the meaning” of a text. As AI scientist Herbert Simon writes,</p>
<p class="longQuotation">It is a matter of terminological preference whether we want to use the word ‘meaning’ broadly enough to encompass the nonrepresentational components of pattern. Apart from the question of terminology, there are no particular problems in seeking out such patterns in a work of art, whether it be music, painting, or literature. It is really the representational component in painting and literature, rather than the nonrepresentational component, that is problematic. (<a class="outbound" href="http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-1/text/simon1.html">Literary Criticism, A Cognitive Approach</a>)</p>
<p>Narrative fiction further complicates the distinction between story and pattern in that both unfold in a protracted temporal and cognitive frame, as opposed to the prescribed, immediate, and material site of a painting or concrete poem. Narratologists refer to narrative as a “universal cognitive structure,” and given its role in patterning or ordering raw information, we might describe it as a pattern measured against the noise of culture, or consciousness, if not reality. But <span class="lightEmphasis">ordering</span> here means “giving coherence to” rather than the arrangement of a chronological or causal order. This is not to say that narrative provides a higher level of organization, only that pattern does not depend on a fixed sequence to convey its meaning.</p>
<p>Recalling the various binary rehearsals of word/world, structure/representation, opacity/transparency, or looking at/looking through the text, we can likewise position pattern/story, where story refers to the represented world and pattern refers to what and how it is represented. But we cannot speak of binaries without speaking of privilege. Which term should come first? Marie-Laure Ryan discusses narrativity in literature as “a matter of degree”: “Postmodern novels are less narrative than simple forms such as fables or fairy tales; popular literature is usually more narrative than avant-garde fiction” (<a class="outbound" href="http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/ryan/">Beyond Myth and Metaphor</a>). Within these categories is it possible to speak of increasing or decreasing degrees? Or would such a discussion only point to the limits inherent in the categories themselves?</p>
<p>The Formalists operated under the assumption that patterns constituted a set grammar for all stories. In this context, patterns gain privilege given that stories cannot escape universal or archetypal parameters. At the same time, story remains primary in structuralist readings at least in terms of visibility, providing the framework for the observation of the <span class="lightEmphasis">underlying</span> pattern(s) of the text. The place of story in contemporary criticism continues to accommodate different and often more dynamic patterns, such as the recursive and reflexive constructs common to multi-layered, discursive texts, which can form the metaleptical loops or “strange attractors” that figure prominently in systems-theoretical readings. More generally, the self-consciousness of late 20th century art, the explosion of new media forms, and the neo-materialist turn in literary criticism all increase the visibility of textual patterns. In much literature written on and for the screen the privilege now goes to pattern recognition over story reception (the phrasing itself implies an opposition between the active and the passive). In networked environments, for example, the mutable and performative qualities of the text complicate causal chains and character development. Caught between what <a class="internal" href="/thread/electropoetics/pragmatic">Scott Rettberg</a> calls the “contemplative” and “performative,” writers who implant storylines overtly in networked fiction, privileging the contemplative experience, face criticism for lacking hypertextuality, whereas writers who privilege conceptual patterning face criticism for lacking a story. These texts would seem to enact a strict inversion of a more familiar critical praxis: the practice of finding patterns amid the (story)lines instead often becomes the practice of finding the (story)lines amid the patterns. In his <span class="booktitle">Language of New Media</span>, Lev Manovich supports this claim in his discussion of database and narrative as antithetical cultural forms, arguing that in “new media” elements of the paradigmatic dimension are related ” <span class="lightEmphasis">in praesentia</span> ” whereas those of the syntagmatic dimension are related ” <span class="lightEmphasis">in absentia</span> ” (230).</p>
<p>The place of a contemplative narrative fiction in a culture inundated with the graphical, the animated, and the immediate remains unclear. But it is at least clear that the required “oscillation” between transparency and opacity, described by Richard Lanham as “the most powerful aesthetic attribute of electronic text” (<span class="booktitle">The Electronic Word</span> 43) and Jay David Bolter as “a defining characteristic” of literary hypertext (<span class="booktitle">Writing Space</span> [1991] 167), comes <span class="lightEmphasis">at the expense</span> of the conjured storyworld. For we cannot unsee what has been seen - unshattering the illusion is a complicated affair. Whatever the narrative medium, the same question applies: given the determination to make space for patterns, how much time is left for the story?</p>
<p>In her discussion of “information narratives,” N. Katherine Hayles suggests that certain texts thrive in the current media ecology partly because they allow for the “text as information pattern to infuse the space of representation” (Hayles, “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers” 8). And in a by now familiar passage that Joyce himself cites in <span class="booktitle">Othermindedness</span> (101), she describes the shift that makes “pattern and randomness more real, more relevant, and more powerful than presence and absence,” a shift that is “encoded into every aspect of contemporary literature” (4-5). Her essay does not explicitly address how information narratives might displace “story” as it is traditionally understood as the motor of narrative. In her landmark <span class="booktitle">How We Became Posthuman</span> (1999), however, Hayles applies her cybernetic methodology predominantly to print texts that hold firm to the normative role of story - a method mirrored in the overall critical-historical organization of her own text. In her next work, <span class="booktitle">Writing Machines</span>, Hayles diversifies her range of tutor texts to include digital works, but retains a narrative organization in the form of the persona, Kaye, which frames the text as personal journey. Manovich, similarly, employs first-person anecdotes to introduce many of the chapters in his <span class="booktitle">Language of New Media</span>. In fact, he introduces his chapter on the ascendancy of database logic with a micronarrative from his personal history (“August 5, 1999. I am sitting in the lobby of Razorfish Studios…” [213]). The proliferation of narrative in these contexts suggests that if the database has inherited the throne as supreme cultural form, then there is still some time before the coronation. <cite id="note_1">See Linda Brigham’s <a class="internal" href="/thread/criticalecologies/disembodied">Are We Posthuman Yet?</a> (<span class="journaltitle">ebr</span> 1999) for a review of <span class="booktitle">How We Became Posthuman</span>, and <a class="internal" href="/thread/electropoetics/wrItten">Komninos Zervos</a>, <a class="internal" href="/thread/electropoetics/playful">Raine Koskimaa</a>, and <a class="internal" href="/thread/electropoetics/blogstyle">Geniwate</a> (<span class="journaltitle">ebr</span> 2003) for reviews of <span class="booktitle">Writing Machines</span>. Geniwate also reviews Manovich in <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/cinematic">New Media and Old: The Limits of Continuity</a> (<span class="journaltitle">ebr</span> 2002).</cite></p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Liam’s Going</span> encodes Hayles’ dialectic of pattern and randomness at certain levels, but at others can be said to encode it only by resisting it. The story-time of <span class="booktitle">Liam’s Going</span> falls somewhere in between the length of the ordinary Dublin day of <span class="booktitle">Ulysses</span> and the seven minutes that transpire in Geoff Ryman’s online novel <span class="booktitle">253</span>, which follows the course of a London train in between stops. Even though the novel’s <span class="emphasis">amazon.com</span> entry somewhat oddly lists “travel literature” as one of the subject categories, it is hardly a road novel. Patterns of thought drive this text, and the stories that do unfold (the death of Noah’s school friend, Cathleen’s intense affair with the apple farmer) are encased in the consciousness of each; they are memories that remain - and, in the case of Cathleen’s affair, must remain - unshared. The alternating focalization between chapters has the distinct effect of delimiting the boundaries of consciousness: the two minds that shape the novel are close enough to be said to constitute one another, and they seem to communicate throughout in some sort of displaced and ill-timed counterpoint; but ultimately they can share neither the same mental nor textual space. In fact, outside of the scenes of memory, Noah and Cathleen meet only in a hypothetical albeit certain reunion in the final chapter. As Joyce’s narrator tells us, “some things were sure even in the subjunctive” (206).</p>
<p>While it encodes pattern at the cognitive level of its characters, the novel diverges from “information narratives” that are shot through with the noise and radiation of technoculture (and its material presentation, released in a numbered and signed edition of 1500, suggests the opposite of Hayles’ “bodiless text”). The work moves toward Joyce’s own notion of “ordinary fiction.” Joyce derives his idea of the <span class="lightEmphasis">ordinary</span> from Ecclesiastical usage, referring to “the part of Mass that remains unchanged from day to day, against which the daily readings come and go” (<span class="booktitle">Othermindedness</span> 204). He initially discussed the concept in the context of hypertextual fiction, emphasizing the recurrent but not necessarily the apparent or plain. For him, ordinary fiction would honor “the day-to-day complexity and shifting drama of ordinary lives” (204).</p>
<p>In order to shift focus (back?) to the complexity of the storyworld, the novel maintains the same discursive level throughout. For example, in the hypothetical final scene, the shift from Noah’s mind to an imagined future - and from figural to authorial diegesis - does not have the effect of a radical ontological rupture for the reader. In part because the style of this final episode does not diverge markedly from that of the Cathleen and Noah chapters (nor, for that matter, does the style differ markedly <span class="lightEmphasis">between</span> the chapters focalizing Cathleen and Noah), and in part because nothing extraordinary happens in the new discursive frame, we can process this scene in the same flow of ordinary events. The scene functions as an afterthought that is made to appear no less believable in its anteriority.</p>
<p>Patterns, too, emerge between people and place. As Cathleen drives through the valley, she muses over the mountain that was Echo before it was Storm King, and Butter Hill before Echo, and Klinkenberg for the Dutch settlers before that: “Did <span class="lightEmphasis">Klinken</span> have the low lost sound of memory for Dutch that echo has for us?” (15). But overall, the tensional movements of memory and desire form the most coherent pattern in the text, uniting the scattered stories throughout and, in turn, accumulating more force than each story in isolation. The governing pattern, in this sense, is more tonal than structural, and it has much in common with the network aesthetic described by Laura Trippi:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Instead of driving the narrative forward, plot to a greater or lesser degree follows mood, which rides and also guides the network’s volatility. In some cases, plot gives way altogether to the ambient interplay of pattern/randomness anchored in mood. (<a class="outbound" href="http://www.netvironments.org/nne/Unit3/Presentation3/view">Networked Narrative Environments</a>).</p>
<p>The Hudson River Valley provides the backdrop for Joyce’s novel, but the setting plays more than a passive role. In the <span class="journaltitle">TrAce</span> interview, Joyce describes the river itself as a dynamic network, albeit one much older, and slower, than the Net:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">It is not an exaggeration to say that the Hudson served as the first network in America, and its technologies, which besides the steamboat included the paintings of the Hudson River School, the literatures of the mountains and valleys, and so on, remain imprinted upon our understanding of the river as an imaginary screen for our consciousness. (<span class="journaltitle">TrAce</span>)</p>
<p>More specifically, the river’s tidal movements serve to foreground the flow of the narrative. Dubbed Muhheakunnuk, “river that flows two ways,” by the Algonquin native to the region, the river generates a distinct push and pull between the mountains above and the ocean bays below. In this sense, Noah’s desire to see pattern as story underscores the desire to look <span class="lightEmphasis">through</span> language to the lives that both pattern and are patterned by the life of the river. The idea is not to make pattern equal story, but rather to endow it with equal representational force. Arguably, a gesture such as this comes more easily from within the material confines of the book. That is, the same network aesthetic described by Trippi cannot dominate the text itself, which is guided not by “the network’s volatility” but rather the turning of pages.</p>
<h2>II. Moore is Less</h2>
<p>That said, one cannot help but feel that absences here are more palpable than patterns - that the emphasis falls on sensing absence rather than finding pattern. Borrowing from Raymond Federman’s surfictionist manifesto, the text does not “offer itself for order and ordering” (12). Rather the textual embroidery follows a delicate yet prescribed design; like the tensional currents of the river, the textual flux finds firm boundaries to either side. Indeed, in <span class="booktitle">Liam’s Going</span>, readers are drawn toward what is absent, left out, or missing. Although readers are always privy to the thoughts of Noah and Cathleen, the narrative often focuses on what the characters fail or have failed to say to one another. The story opens with Liam sitting next to his mother in the car with his “ears plugged with black foam inserts” (in what also amounts to the only occasion of the cyborg) (7). More significantly, Cathleen decides never to tell her husband about her affair with Paul. What was for her an intense and enchanting event - and the inspiration for her latest poem - becomes an omission for and of the husband. Liam’s impending absence motivates the work as a whole. In one of the novel’s more forceful moments, Noah escapes with a bottle of Bourbon to the sanctity of his Lexus in the garage after being “burdened by something briefly bigger than himself and no space to consider it” - his son’s meditations on death (149). When Cathleen locates him later, he repeats his son’s question: “It makes me angry and frustrated when I think that what we are as individuals might not exist after death” (150-51). “Not a question exactly,” Cathleen thinks in turn, “yet every question,” and, of course, a woeful recognition of the most final of absences. For a novel that avoids crossing ontological boundaries, it follows that Joyce’s characters would feel uncomfortable even questioning them.</p>
<p>In attempting to find a shape for a novel so mindful of absence, one might hark back to a geometric form familiar to critics of James Joyce - the gnomon. The gnomon denotes the shape remaining when a smaller parallelogram has been removed from the corner of a larger one. It also refers to the pillar of a sundial, in which the casting of shadow signifies the omission of light. Both denotations emphasize what is missing. The gnomon appears in the opening of “The Sisters,” Joyce’s first story in <span class="booktitle">Dubliners</span> (1914), seemingly in passing in a list of words “that sounded strangely” to the ears of the boy narrator. Since then, the concept has come to suggest anything from the emptiness of Dublin life for Joyce’s earliest characters, to the impotence, both sexual and creative, of his later poet-protagonists. <cite id="note_2">Hayles speaks of castration as “the moment when the (male) subject symbolically confronts the realization that subjectivity, like language, is founded on absence” (“Virtual Bodies”). But if the masculine metaphorics at work in the (Lacanian) psychoanalytic discourse can be blamed for dating and limiting the dialectic of presence and absence, then Michael Joyce’s novel - a meditation on lost lovers, deceased friends, and a family soon to be dispersed - cannot be blamed for treating absence in terms of a strictly male subjectivity.</cite></p>
<p>The gnomon can be said to organize <span class="booktitle">Liam’s Going</span>, at the thematic level as well as the structural level. For instance, if story is to be thought of as a representation of events that have occurred, then the reunion in the final chapter, rendered only in the hypothetical, transcribes an omission. Moreover, the name <span class="lightEmphasis">Liam</span> is gnomon to <span class="lightEmphasis">William</span>, the name that remains after a smaller part is removed from the larger whole (as an only child, he one day will be what remains of the Williams trio). Along with these structural or organizational invocations of gnomon as void, silences permeate <span class="booktitle">Liam’s Going</span>, such as the gaps in communication between Cathleen and Liam during the drive to his school, which remind us that absence is not a prerequisite for silence; that is, we feel the most acute silences in the presence of others. At one point, Cathleen, “sounding the lines into the automobile silence,” recites the opening of Marianne Moore’s “Poetry”: “I, too, dislike it: there are things that are more important beyond all this fiddle” (89). Moore’s poem speaks of a “perfect contempt” for poetry - a gesture that seems rhetorical given her chosen medium. But the sentiment takes on added significance when we recall that Moore disliked “Poetry” enough to omit everything beyond the first two lines of that poem in the final edition of her <span class="booktitle">Collected Poems</span> (1951). For Moore, “Poetry” itself exists as a gnomon, the shape of what remains. Similarly, for Cathleen, “as we try to understand the place of any one place in our lives…the poem is what’s left of all that is unsaid” (144-45). The poem must suffice to articulate “the things more important” than itself; despite its inadequacy, the poem must name and rename what Moore calls “the place of the genuine” in her own remnant poem. Unwilling to see the act of inscribing surfaces as inevitably superficial, Cathleen willingly accepts the paradox.</p>
<p>Cathleen’s recitation of Moore’s verse immediately follows her own “Unpoem of no thingness” and her meditation on wordplay, which “annoyed her in herself and others” (27). Later on during the drive, Cathleen recalls the stories that Liam used to tell of imagined mythological worlds, “endless chronicles of what never was” (90-91). She thinks of them dismissively as games, which reminded her of the “nothingness of language…mere patterns…word games” (92). Perhaps we are to read her dismissal of Liam’s mythological world against the creation of her own, for the story of Cathleen and the orchard man is itself a chronicle of what once was; but now, inversely, she has romanticized the affair to the point where it can exist only in a quasi-mythological world, preserved among the curves of mountains named Echo and Storm, or again in the curves that comprise her verse. In a reflection of Cathleen’s sentiments, the narrative itself is reluctant to play with words. <span class="booktitle">Liam’s Going</span> does not present the reader with a high degree of linguistic or stylistic indeterminacy, a wordscape obfuscated by an authorial sleight-of-hand, in comparison not only to Joyce’s hypertexts, which indulge the ludic (and are regarded as playful by virtue of their form), but also his theoretical texts in print, which are riddled with refrains, side-winding parentheses, and bracketed embeddings (see for example the second chapter of <span class="booktitle">Othermindedness</span>, “MOO or Mistakenness”).</p>
<p>There are playful moments. At one point Cathleen recalls the story of Susan Warner’s popular 19th century novel, <span class="booktitle">The Wide, Wide World</span>, which is, appropriately, a story of coming-of-age. She subsequently returns to the phrase “wide wide world” (68, 77) with a blunt affection that makes it difficult to read as anything other than a jab at the implied unreality of the World Wide Web. A more noticeable interpolation occurs with Noah’s cerebral act of self-editing as he attempts to describe his elderly client: “Well into her eighties now…she was harp-backed (was that the word?) with what Noah supposed they would call papery skin” (45). The third-person narration allows for a slippage between the narrator and Noah, which complicates exactly who is questioning the choice of words. But these moments are rare, and are subsumed by the affective weight of Joyce’s portraitures. On the whole, the text is unconcerned with cryptic configurations at the linguistic level. These become, in Cathleen’s phrase, “mere patterns.”</p>
<p>As Hayles makes clear, the dialectics of pattern/randomness and presence/absence do not exist in “antagonistic relation” (11). That the novel engages with both but does not ground itself firmly in either will be for some a strength and for others a weakness. By privileging those patterns that exist in the world it represents and, by extension, the<br />
world(s) of our own lived experience, however, the novel no doubt succeeds in allowing the storyworld to infuse the text as information pattern. As far as storytelling goes, Joyce lets the narrative motor of <span class="booktitle">Liam’s Going</span> idle inconspicuously while the narrative mood sets in. At the same time, the patterns that ultimately emerge to tether the text will be for some too delicate and too diaphanous to be held, even in memory.</p>
<p style="text-align:center">_________________</p>
<h2>Works Cited</h2>
<p>Federman, Raymond. <span class="booktitle">Surfiction</span>. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1975.</p>
<p>Hayles, N. Katherine. “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers,” 1993. online at <a class="outbound" href="http://www.english.ucla.edu/faculty/hayles/Flick.html">http://englishwww.humnet.ucla.edu/faculty/hayles/Flick.html</a></p>
<p>Joyce, Michael. <span class="booktitle">Othermindedness: The Emergence of Network Culture</span>. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Liam’s Going</span>: Review and Interview by Mary Cavill. <span class="journaltitle">TrAce</span> Online Writing Centre, December 2002. <a class="outbound" href="http://TrAce.ntu.ac.uk/showcase/index.cfm?article=33">http://TrAce.ntu.ac.uk/showcase/index.cfm?article=33</a></p>
<p>Manovich, Lev. <span class="booktitle">The Language of New Media</span>. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.</p>
<p>Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Beyond Myth and Metaphor: The Case of Narrative in Digital Media” in <span class="journaltitle">Game Studies</span>, volume 1, issue 1, July 2001, <a class="outbound" href="http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/ryan/">http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/ryan/</a></p>
<p>Simon, Herbert. “Literary Criticism, A Cognitive Approach,” <span class="journaltitle">Stanford Electronic Humanities Review</span>, volume 4, issue 1: “Bridging the Gap,” Updated 8 April 1995, online at <a class="outbound" href="http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-1/text/simon1.html">http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-1/text/simon1.html</a></p>
<p>Trippi, Laura. “Networked Narrative Environments,” Oct. 2003. <a class="outbound" href="http://www.netvironments.org/nne/Unit3/Presentation3/view">www.netvironments.org/nne/Unit3/Presentation3/view</a></p>
<p style="text-align:center">_________________</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/dave-ciccoricco">dave ciccoricco</a>, <a href="/tags/michael-joyce">michael joyce</a>, <a href="/tags/hypertext">hypertext</a>, <a href="/tags/mary-cavill">mary cavill</a>, <a href="/tags/katherine-hayles">Katherine Hayles</a>, <a href="/tags/lev-manovich">lev manovich</a>, <a href="/tags/marie-laure-ryan">marie-laure ryan</a>, <a href="/tags/storytelling">storytelling</a>, <a href="/tags/narratology">narratology</a>, <a href="/tags/pattern-recognition">pattern recognition</a>, <a href="/tags/structuralism">structuralism</a>, <a href="/tags/formalism">formalism</a>, <a href="/tags/herbert-simon">herbert simon</a>, <a href="/tags/laura-trippi">laura trippi</a>, <a href="/tags/hypertext">hypertext</a>, <a href="/tags/networked-fiction">networked fiction</a>, <a href="/tags/raymond-federman">Raymond Federman</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator925 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comThe Contour of a Contourhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/tropical
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Dave Ciccoricco</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2003-06-13</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>One “is no longer maintaining a public online presence” (as if you could ever really be “present” on the Web). The other blogs away like it’s going out of style (and some can only hope). <cite class="note" id="note_1">The first time I used the word <span class="lightEmphasis">blog</span> I was walking through a park long ago and I needed a word to describe what I had just stepped in. At their worst, weblogs promise to be reality television’s revenge on literature; <a class="internal" href="/thread/electropoetics/serial">at their best</a>, they are a digital art form that promises to keep us extraordinarily human. I intend to keep my mind open. And my shoes clean.</cite> I’m referring here to Michael Joyce and Mark Bernstein, two of the most instrumental figures in what Joyce himself once described as the “earnest, even heroic” project of bringing together the “disparate concerns of scientist and humanist - without sacrificing their particularity” (<span class="booktitle">Of Two Minds</span> 7). Indeed, though Joyce’s own writing insists that he has not “retreated from the hypertextual,” he has at least retreated from hypertext’s most monstrous incarnation - the World Wide Web. And in the more nebulous realm of things “hypertextual,” Joyce, by his own cryptic admission, has said that he “no longer find[s] satisfying factors in its shifting features” (<span class="booktitle">Othermindedness</span> 3). His aversion to the WWW and its “empty room rhetoric” (52) is of course no secret; and the image of a pile of stones effectively marking his online absence is suggestive, though I can only guess what it’s supposed to suggest. <cite id="note_2">In <span class="booktitle">Of Two Minds</span> (233) and in <span class="booktitle">Twilight, A Symphony</span> Joyce invokes the following fragment, “Atom recalling granule, granule stone, stone the great mountain, mountain the first home.” If nothing else, then, the diminutive stone mountain on his Not Home Page suggests something of a recalling or returning. Whether he intends to return home to “his storytelling roots” (as the dust jacket of his recent print novel suggests) or just home for the day is a question best left to amateur prophets; probing his personal motivations, similarly, is best left to the “biographiles.”</cite> Meanwhile, somewhere behind Eastgate Systems’ enduring stone-front archway - and a decade is an eternity in the flickering cosmos of the computer screen - Bernstein continues to match minds and machinery for the networked masses.</p>
<p><span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/sculpture.jpg" alt="rock pile image" width="147" height="149" /></span><br /><span class="caption">Joyce’s sculpture</span></p>
<p><span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/newArch.gif" alt="archway image" width="199" height="149" /></span><br /><span class="caption">Eastgate’s archway - design by Stephen Cohen, registered trademark of Eastgate Systems, Inc.</span></p>
<p>The more I look at these rock piles the more they look like rock piles, which is only to say that I want to see them both as cairns. Cairns are collections of stones that serve as landmarks or memorials commonly found on trails that are otherwise difficult to follow. Eastgate’s archway is a landmark in the young history of electronic publishing. Some would agree that it is also a memorial to soon-to-be updated or outdated institutions of print.</p>
<p>Joyce’s cairn might be a memorial and a landmark as well. The message that accompanies the image on the WWW, voiced in the third-person (” <a class="outbound" href="http://iberia.vassar.edu/~mijoyce"><span class="lightEmphasis">Michael Joyce</span> is no longer…</a> “), has the not unintended effect of someone else placing the stones in Joyce’s absence, as a memorial to an author abandoning his electronic art. Those who think this reading does not bode well for the patron saint of hypertext fiction had best get the revisionism underway. Nonetheless, whether Joyce is writing of the shores of the Great Lakes or the mountains of the Hudson River Valley, he has always found a certain solace in stone, and it would make sense for him to be the artist “behind” the sculpture; that is, the one who “places” it there, the presence marking its own absence. This reading makes the cairn more landmark than memorial, and we can imagine a pathway that continues, and perhaps cycles, beyond. Either way, we can say without elegy that Joyce has marked out a path for others to follow.</p>
<p>But in this essay I will not seek the path to either the stone sculpture or the stone gate. Instead, in light of the divergence they symbolize, I will trace a path - or more specifically, a contour - between the two. The story goes something like this: A scientist and an artist create a trope to understand the qualitative experience of electronic texts. They call it Contour. They each take the trope in different directions, into markedly different contexts, and it undergoes its own series of transformations. Has their subsequent work atomized the concept of hypertextual Contour, or has the work somehow created the concept’s own foundation? In terms of our media ecology and our own cognition, where can we locate the notion of Contour now, and where is the path headed?</p>
<p>I will not attempt to widen the rift between science and art or mobilize a rhetoric of reconciliation that ultimately reveals only how “disparate” are the fundamental concerns of the scientist and the humanist. Both Bernstein and Joyce - <span class="lightEmphasis">self-described</span> scientist and artist respectively - work toward an understanding of literature, a literature that is increasingly electronic. Therefore, their discipline by definition results from a border crossing and marks a return, in spirit, to a much older connotation of technology (from the Greek, techne = art/skill) as an already artistic pursuit. Rather the intention here is to sustain (or recuperate) a viable way of reading texts that transcend or defy or frustrate our expectations of reading, a practical and pedagogically sound way of understanding the “text beyond the text.”</p>
<h2>Constructing Contours</h2>
<p>In an effort to better describe the experience of reading “large and complex” hypertexts, Joyce co-authored “Contours of Constructive Hypertexts” with Mark Bernstein and David Levine for the ACM Hypertext conference in 1992. As with books, “small” and “large” are relative dimensions, but from a systems design point of view, a small hypertext often becomes a large one when it crosses a design threshold. These thresholds present themselves in the form of material constraints, such as how many nodes in an overview map “fit” on a single screen (without interminable scrolling) and without, say, sacrificing legibility of their titles. At the same time, these material constraints are always related to cognitive constraints - our own perceptual thresholds. These thresholds tell us to consider as small a hypertext we can read in an hour. A large one could take weeks or more.</p>
<p>Much of the theory of hypertext grew out of the phenomenology of the hyperlink - its typologies, poetics, pragmatics, and so on. This emphasis revealed, among most early theorists, an understanding of the link as the fundamentally “new” element of digital literature and the single most observable element in a confined “locality” - that of [node-link-node]. From this localized understanding, theorists built a bottom-up rhetoric of pathways and semantic neighborhoods that cohered for many in Jim Rosenberg’s (1996) description of a hypertext “episode.” The authors of the 1992 article were looking to represent structure beyond both the local node-link-node and what we can call the regional episode, which is still confined to “all or part of a trail or path” (“Structure” 23). <span class="lightEmphasis">Large</span>, to them, referred to something not easily visualized in “static, graph-theoretic measures” (“Contours” 161), namely boxes and lines with directional arrows that tend to fit neatly on a page or a screen. But the authors also take on two subjects at once that are not necessarily related: large hypertexts and hypertexts that are not <span class="lightEmphasis">fixed</span>. Hence, they wanted to visualize not only hypertexts that were inconceivably big, but also those that were conceivably borderless.</p>
<p>In “Contours of Constructive Hypertexts,” Bernstein, Joyce, and Levine state, “the structures of meaning or <span class="lightEmphasis">contours</span> we observe in current hypertext fiction and scholarship do not appear to reside in static structures, but rather in the complex and dynamic perceptions of the engaged reader” (161). A lot hinges on this statement regarding not so much what they observe but where they observe it. Surveying a new field of possibility in search, not surprisingly, of hypertextual difference, the authors demarcate a territory unique to hypertext literature. They do so carefully, however, noting that their form of Contour <span class="lightEmphasis">does not appear</span> to reside in static structures (read: the literature of print). But given the intense efforts to mine the art that prefigures network culture in light of the now common understanding that the “hypertextual” is by no means exclusively digital, we can justify a renewed consideration of one particular hypertextual theory as applied to specific works of art. Is the hypertextual Contour, for example, bound up in analyses peculiar to electronic art forms?</p>
<p>We know that their Contour traces its own source back to a static medium. The authors “borrow the terms depth and contour from the painter’s vocabulary to describe a similar sense of form which the reader gains as she reads” (164). Even though they work off the early hypertextual ideal that “hypertext dissolves the distinction between readers and writers” (164), their analogy specifically aligns the perception of a painting (by an implied viewer) with the perception of a text (by an implied reader-writer). The analogy emphasizes the visual qualities of hypertext by placing it in the interpretive tradition of <span class="lightEmphasis">ut pictura poesis</span> (as with painting, so in poetry). But their reliance here on <span class="lightEmphasis">audience</span> perception is a slightly confusing gesture given their focus on the Contours of <span class="lightEmphasis">constructive</span> hypertexts, which - by Joyce’s own well-known elaborations - are all about process rather than product. The depth and contour that emerge <span class="lightEmphasis">to the painter</span> (simultaneously her own audience) as she paints might have been an even more appropriate parallel.</p>
<p>But at the time the dichotomy of constructive and exploratory was still relatively unfamiliar, and though Joyce introduces the concept as early as 1988 (in “Siren Shapes: Exploratory and Constructive Hypertexts,” and republished in <span class="booktitle">Of Two Minds</span>), the collaborative 1992 essay implies that the concept itself was something of a construction site. For example, the description of constructive hypertext as “a foundation for what does not exist” (166) follows a broader one that defines it as “the text rewritten by the act of choice” (165). True, the authors refer explicitly to a hypertext that is “open to change and addition and revision” (166). But any hypertext is open to change in the sense that no two readings are assembled in the same way, and any hypertext fundamentally involves an unfamiliar dynamics of selection. Thus, literary theorists, especially those entrenched in theories of reader-response, intuitively saw this choice making as an act of “inscription” - the text re-written by the reader. Those touting the “empowered” hypertext reader were especially quick to conflate the reader’s ability to, on the one hand, <span class="lightEmphasis">change</span> specific nodes or add new ones and, on the other hand, <span class="lightEmphasis">arrange</span> or assemble their order as a necessary function of reading. Contour <span class="lightEmphasis">could</span> describe a user’s experience of an extant hypertext, and so the concept was adopted primarily as a way of reading despite its origins in more writerly theories of constructive hypertext. In fact, some readers reflexively borrow Joyce’s concept of Contour to review his fiction (see, for example, Robert Siegle’s <a class="outbound" href="http://www.thebluemoon.com/4/siegle.html">review</a> of <span class="booktitle">Twilight, a Symphony</span>).</p>
<p>Other factors pried Contour away from its purely “constructive” roots. For all its promise, constructive hypertext - like any theoretical model of “becoming” - paradoxically enacts a self-defeating discourse: the more you describe - or inscribe - it, the more you risk pre-programming or pre-empting its future forms and uses. Constructive hypertext, after all, demands a de-territorialized landscape, to borrow a phrase from Deleuze and Guattari. Theorists, more importantly, had to avoid filling this metaphysical void with the promise of technology per se, for technology, ironically, threatened to become the <span class="lightEmphasis">new center</span> of the liberatory, de-centered discourse that it claimed to effect.</p>
<p>Either way, it was not long before structures for what was yet to exist started to fill themselves in and, well…exist (“Every well-designed exploratory hypertext proceeds from a constructive hypertext…” <span class="booktitle">Of Two Minds</span> 44). And it was not long before there was a structure for everything that could ever possibly want to exist (or so it seemed). We call it the Web, and even though it was both large and unfixed, it was definitely not what Joyce had in mind: “The truth is I don’t enjoy the web very much…the truth is that the web puts me at a loss and I do not exactly know why” (<span class="booktitle">Othermindedness</span> 51). But on the Web or not, the architecture of a “city of text” awaited description - a description at once fluid and concrete.</p>
<h2>Tangibly Conceptual Contours</h2>
<p>As a theory of reading, Contour arises from a particular experience of a given text and finds a coherent form, or rather a procession of transient forms. Articulating Contour, however, demands a turn of phrase (“trope” is from the Greek <span class="lightEmphasis">tropos</span> meaning “turn”), for the procession of transient forms wants to be simultaneously tangible and conceptual. For Stuart Moulthrop, “the contour is real but virtual” (“<a class="outbound" href="http://www.pd.org/topos/perforations/perf3/shadow_of_info.html">The Shadow of an Informand</a>” [38]). For Jim Rosenberg, Contour “concerns the geography” of what he calls the hypertext episode, and he too resorts to a turn of phrase when he defines the episode as “simply whatever group of actemes coheres in the reader’s mind as a tangible entity” (“Structure” 23). So the intent is to articulate something co-extensive with object and event, but ultimately something that is very much there - in the mind. We might see it as an indispensable cartographic convention in the creation of a cognitive map. At the same time, geometrical planes necessarily become planes of the tail-spinning variety when we force them into the free-floating topology of network space - regardless of whether our network is digital or entirely conceptual. Thus (as with any conceptual understanding) so much is lost in translation when this representation is mapped onto anything static. Any such representation remains just as inert on the screen as on the page.</p>
<p>Contour became an axis of orientation for early hypertextualists. It inscribed something of an ephemeral terra firma, curving through not only individual hypertext readings but also through a middle-ground hypertextual criticism. Joyce, of course, realized that the task was not to steady the foundation but rather to find new means of measuring the movement: “Previously stable horizons across my psychic landscape gave way to dizzying patterns of successive contours, each of which was most assuredly real, each of which did not last.” Contour derives force from its ability to mediate. Two years before his own “structure of hypertext activity” (1996) took shape, Rosenberg asked, “Can we describe the contour as the attempt to resolve disjunctive experience into conjunctive resonance?” (“<a class="outbound" href="http://www.well.com/user/jer/NNHI.html">Navigating Nowhere</a>” 2). And Moulthrop’s analogy between Contour and his own notion of the “informand” (“the momentary structures of coherence and possibility apparent to the reader as she interacts with the structure” [29]) reinforces the concept’s medial quality. Simply stated, Moulthrop’s informand, like a Contour, is an “object-event.” That it <span class="lightEmphasis">is</span> an object in space and <span class="lightEmphasis">becomes</span> an event in time signals a convergence, in Joyce’s own phrase, of the “space of memory and the time of narrative experience” (<span class="booktitle">Of Two Minds</span> 159-171). Hence, as spatial object and temporal event, Contour can also be said to mediate the vertiginous polemic of space and time.</p>
<p>Early on, however, Contour was used most simply as a new measure of reading, or of movement - again in the realm of the “tangible conceptual.” As both noun and verb, it suggests not only how hypertextual Contours emerge when reading, but also how the reader’s selections actively shape or <span class="lightEmphasis">contour</span> the hypertext. And in the years that followed the 1992 paper, two of its authors would shape the notion of Contour itself in different ways. Bernstein’s Contour would arc toward the operational, the instrumental, the unambiguous. Joyce’s would arc toward the poetic, and the erotic.</p>
<h2>Contour of Two Minds</h2>
<p>Joyce writes extensively about Contour in <span class="booktitle">Of Two Minds</span> (1995), specifically in the third and final section, “Contours: Hypertext Poetics.” If we can understand Contour only in its liquid state, then Joyce’s definitions are equally fluid:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Contours are the shape of what we think we see as we see it but that we know we have seen only after we move over them, and new contours of our own shape themselves over what they have left us. They are, in short, what happens as we go… (207)</p>
<p>Later in the same essay, other definitions coalesce: “Contour is one expression of the perceptible form of a constantly changing text, made by any of its readers or writers at a given point in its reading or writing” (214). In a formulation that he would later call his “most discrete” and one that “suffers from its fixity” (<span class="booktitle">Othermindedness</span> 167), Joyce breaks the concept into a potentiality of component parts, namely:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Its constituent elements include the current state of the text at hand, the perceived intentions and interactions of previous writers and readers that led to the text at hand, and those interactions with the text that the current reader or writer sees as leading from it. (214)</p>
<p>We can emphasize his repetition of the “text at hand,” for the phrase anticipates the trope’s next semantic accretion: the Contour as caress. “Contours are discovered sensually,” he wrote in 1995. But Joyce waited until his next book of theoretical narratives to explain what he meant.</p>
<h2>Contour’s Othermindedness</h2>
<p>In his introduction, Joyce resolves to continue “grounding our experience of the emergence of network culture in the body” (4) and it is clear that the writings of Hélène Cixous (who contributes an Afterword for his <span class="booktitle">Moral Tales and Meditations</span> published a year later in 2001) have had a hand in shaping both Joyce’s theoretical narratives and, more specifically, his notion of hypertextual Contour. Indeed, readers can look to Joyce for what was the most visible emergence of an erotics of hypertext.</p>
<p>Though Joyce readily admits at one point that he “honestly believe[s] hypertextuality is about sexuality,” he elaborates only obliquely, musing on a notably gendered excerpt from Vannevar Bush (1945) that seems to him so much like a “comic love story between man and machine” (219). Joyce does not set out to do with literary hypertext what Roland Barthes does with his “text of Bliss” (Barthes uses <span class="lightEmphasis">contour</span> at one point in his <span class="booktitle">Pleasure of the Text</span> to link our physical body to the body of the text, describing a medial “body of bliss” that “consists solely of erotic relations” [16]). The two articulate different, even incompatible, textual pleasures. Barthes’ <span class="foreignWord">jouissance</span> calls up a rapturous, climactic, or even violent bliss in which cultural codes and forms are fractured or transgressed. Joyce, by contrast, invokes Contour to feel the forms we create but cannot see: “I had in mind…the sense of a lover’s caress in which the form expresses itself in successiveness without necessarily any fixation” (167). Both seek a pleasure devoid of intention - from the text as it exists, not as it intends. But Joyce plays more to the tune of the never-ending story in that, unlike Barthes, the pleasure of his text comes without necessarily any climax, from a succession more stable and sustained.</p>
<p>Even if some theorists had hoped to parade a more virile brand of hypertextual eroticism, this tack might have been noticeably premature. At the time, hypertext theory was awkwardly re-positioning itself after striking a staunchly antithetical pose toward the linear tradition and its “missionary position of reading.” <cite id="note_3">The phrase belongs to Sven Birkerts who uses it to describe what he sees as the privileged way of reading (<span class="booktitle">Gutenberg Elegies: the Fate of Reading in the Electronic Age</span>. Faber and Faber Ltd., 1996).</cite> Nonetheless, it was the same school of early hypertext theory that, despite its commendable efforts in placing hypertext in plain view of education, theory, and literature, generated easily some of the least sexy terminology for the new medium. This was achieved in part by referring to the building blocks of hypertext as “chunks.” True, “lexia” sounds “sexier” (the two words rhyme in England, Australia, and New Zealand) but a hasty and ultimately untidy union of hypertext theory and post-structuralist theory made it difficult for that term to endure. Other notable attempts at forging a sexually attractive terminology followed, and Nick Montfort offers an example as decent as any in his <a class="internal" href="../electropoetics/cyberdebates">review</a> of Espen Aarseth’s <span class="booktitle">Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature</span>. In a section he subtitles “Hot, ergodic cybertext,” Monfort writes, ” <span class="lightEmphasis">Ergodics</span> and <span class="lightEmphasis">cybertext</span> provoke curiosity. Aarseth attracts the reading eye by using one neologism each for title and subtitle. He has also selected terms that sound somewhat similar to the words <span class="lightEmphasis">erotics</span> and <span class="lightEmphasis">cybersex</span>.” Although we can never know for sure with such claims, sometimes we only see what we desire.</p>
<p>Joyce distances himself from the erotics of the virtual as well. Despite all of its free-floating evocations, virtual reality traces the movements of the body to fixed coordinates on what is essentially a three-dimensional Cartesian grid. As Heidi Tikka explains, “In the VR-space the abstracted vision becomes associated with a pointing gesture, moving the user forward in a constant state of erection” (Tikka, cited in <span class="booktitle">Othermindedness</span> 101). “Instead of this ceremony of erection,” Joyce writes, “I have…characterized hypertext in terms of contour” (<span class="booktitle">Othermindedness</span> 101). But more generally, the insistence on grounding the experience of hypertext in the body served to counter-balance the notion of hypertext as metaphor for the human mind or - in the strong reading - an externalized embodiment of our own neural networks. In the latter, of course, the only thing that is embodied is our brain. In line with Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, Douglas Engelbart, and other patriarchs of hypertext invested in augmenting human memory and intelligence, J. David Bolter, Joyce’s colleague and co-creator of Storyspace, adopts the metaphoric reading in <span class="booktitle">Writing Space</span> (1991) when he describes computers as “a new metaphor for the human mind and for our culture’s collective mentality” (11). In <span class="booktitle">Of Two Minds</span>, Joyce explicitly states that he shares this vision (57). Also, in the same work, he is guilty at times of claiming too much in the way of “externalizing” creativity when referring to the Storyspace overviews. It is a claim that J. Yellowlees Douglas takes even further by calling the software overviews themselves “cognitive maps,” a move that draws a footnoted rebuke from Rosenberg, who calls the equation a “serious confusion” (“Structure” 26). Storyspace eventually introduced curves to the lines of its directed graphs, but these contours have little to do with the Contours Joyce would find “not in the text, the author, or the reader, but rather those moments that express relationships among them in the form of reader as writer” (<span class="booktitle">Othermindedness</span> 26). Joyce adds, “its figure for me…is the body…the curve we read in the caress” (44).</p>
<p>At the same time, if he eroticizes the hypertextual body in <span class="booktitle">Othermindedness</span>, then Joyce’s metaphors remain skin-deep (“Skin is screen,” he says in one of his narrative refrains [93]). Harpold, like Joyce, wished to ground the experience of electronic art forms in the body; but unlike Joyce, he was not content to glean an intuitive apprehension of depth by caressing surfaces. In fact, moving from a Bahktinian reading of the “grotesque body,” he employs metaphors that are gastrointestinal rather than erotic: “Imagining the texture of the stuff that moves in your gut is, I think, an appropriate beginning for thinking about the texture of the space defined by the anatomy of an electronic text.” (“<a class="outbound" href="http://www.pd.org/topos/perforations/perf3/grotesque_corpus.html">The Grotesque Corpus</a>”). Again, hypertext becomes an externalization, but only of what we had for lunch. Did someone mention something about chunks?</p>
<h2>Over-arching Contours</h2>
<p>If “hypertext is, before anything else, a visual form” (<span class="booktitle">Of Two Minds</span> 19), Contour articulates its visualization. (In fact, partly because of the visual quality implicit in the word <span class="lightEmphasis">contour</span>, the concept persists whereas something more opaque, for example, Moulthrop’s “informand,” does not). Joyce says that the visual form of electronic texts “may include” the following: [1] “the apparent content of the text at hand,” [2] “its explicit or available design,” or [3] “implicit and dynamic designs” such as “patterns, juxtapositions, or recurrences within the text or abstractions situated outside the text” (<span class="booktitle">Othermindedness</span> 22). A Contour <span class="lightEmphasis">may</span> contain these things. And it may not. It may - to quote this candy bar wrapper here - contain traces of peanuts. But a failure to list its component parts does not make it any less palatable as a theoretical idea. After all, we perceive Contour only by gestalt, and any gestalt perception fails to present itself as a coherent whole through a summation of its constituent parts.</p>
<p>But when we begin to consider also those “abstractions situated outside” of the text, we approach a more comprehensive phenomenology of reading. Indeed, Joyce’s later articulations of Contour gesture not simply toward one observable element of a manifold system, or one moment that affords its articulation, but rather toward a demonstration of a system in itself. In an “Intermezzo” piece in <span class="booktitle">Othermindedness</span>, for instance, the Contour becomes nothing short of an encompassing - albeit multiple - totality: it is “how the forms of things mean,…the totality of the work” (130). Therefore, if a hypothetical graph of the history of Contour is level and steady when it describes a de-territorialized “space of inscription for a reader,” then it undoubtedly spikes when it becomes, for Joyce, a space for the “real”: “What you cannot describe but you can only see is the inverse of the simulacrum, the real for which there is no fixed representation, or what…I’ve [previously] called the contour” (128). Setting aside what his notion of Contour includes, we might ask instead: what doesn’t it include? At what point does an array of smooth Contours become a tangled mess?</p>
<h2>Bernstein’s Patterns</h2>
<p>It is a question Mark Bernstein, upon presenting his “<a class="outbound" href="http://www.eastgate.com/patterns/">Patterns of Hypertext</a> ” in 1998, does not have to ask. In fact, Bernstein takes the trope along what seems like an opposing trajectory, engaging in a pragmatic pinning down of sorts while his colleague revels in poly-semantics. Citing continued calls for structured hypertext in what was by then more clearly a defamiliarized rather than an intrinsically disorienting medium (much to Bernstein’s own credit), he aimed to devise “an appropriate vocabulary” that would allow us “to discern and discuss patterns in hypertexts that may otherwise seem an impenetrable tangle or arbitrary morass” (1). “The problem,” according to Bernstein, “is not that the hypertexts lack structure but rather that we lack words to describe it.”</p>
<p>His “structural vocabulary” identified ten patterns, including the hypertextual Cycle, in which “a reader returns to a previously-visited node and eventually departs along a new path” (2). The Cycle gives rise to an assortment of other rhetorical or literary effects that arise from the experience of textual recurrence, repetition, or refrain. But Bernstein’s emphasis is not rhetorical; instead, it’s exacting and literal. Strictly speaking, Contour in “Patterns” is something other than a trope, since it is intended as part of a new vocabulary with a singular connotation, as opposed to an “existing” word that assumes new ones. Contour, here, is an effect of Cycle. More specifically, a plurality of Cycles produces Contour: it is “formed where cycles impinge on each other” and allow “free movement within and between the paths defined by each cycle” (3).</p>
<p>Affording Contour an unambiguous role allows Bernstein to represent it in a static graphic image. More ideogram than graph, it looks like this:</p>
<p><span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/Contour.gif" alt="pattern image" width="64" height="64" /></span></p>
<p>Bernstein employs these patterns in the service of an earlier - and perhaps too early abandoned - project of “providing a richer vocabulary of local structure” (2). And we can recall that in the 1992 article the authors put faith in static representations to “facilitate understanding of local hypertext structure” (161). Bernstein, then, both stabilizes and localizes the concept of Contour in “Patterns.”</p>
<p>Nevertheless, the Contours described by Bernstein and Joyce are not mutually exclusive. In fact, their two trajectories can be said to intersect in the service of a theoretical discourse that seeks to articulate the paradoxical stability and dynamism of the electronic text. It is the same discursive role Moulthrop considers over a decade earlier: “A rhetorical theory of the contour <span class="lightEmphasis">augmented</span>, perhaps, by a practical technique of contour representation and navigation could yield an important shift in our understanding of hypertext [my emphasis]” (Informand [44]). Hence, we can compute a pattern of Contour in the local, without impinging on the expansive conceptual domain of Joyce’s poetics. Bernstein’s Contour works as a ground to Joyce’s figure. Both, however, are rooted in a ground that moves, not only in the rhetorical sense of shifting discourse, but also in a material sense, with regard to software systems.</p>
<p>In “<a class="outbound" href="http://www.markbernstein.org/talks/HT01.html">Card Shark and Thespis</a>: exotic tools for hypertext narrative,” Bernstein takes sufficient note of this shifting movement when he asks, “Are the properties of hypertext fiction…intrinsic to hypertext, or do they arise from the idiosyncrasies of specific systems?” (41). He sets out to test this hypothesis by building not a “better system,” but rather a “strange system that might let us step back from Storyspace and the Web in order to gain a better perspective” (41). It is more likely that such a perspective will be possible only after another system, ideally created by someone other than Eastgate, pervades the artistic community to the same degree as Storyspace has. In the meantime, criticisms leveled at either Eastgate or its systems (what some have referred to as the “Church of Hypertext”) accomplish little when they fail to imagine a material alternative let alone build one.</p>
<p>Bernstein applies the same logic of perspective to the work of others. In a review of Rebecca Blood’s <span class="booktitle">Weblog Handbook</span>, he writes, “While Blood is fascinated by the social and hypertextual structures that bind the Web, she has no interest in software or in the ways particular tools may shape weblogs and weblog clusters” (“<a class="outbound" href="http://www.eastgate.com/HypertextNow/archives/WeblogHandbook.html">A Romantic View of Weblogs</a>”). With regard to Storyspace, Bernstein sees potential and limits concurrently: “Conventional node-link views like Storyspace and MacWeb represent isolated cycles fairly well but provide little support for visualizing contours created where many cycles intersect” (“Patterns” 13). Furthermore, as Moulthrop notes, “we must understand that the two domains of virtual space, the architectonic space of mapping and the semantic space of conceptual development, do not perfectly correspond” (“Where No Mind Has Gone Before” 206). A poetics of Contour comes into play when visualizing both the complex interstice of cycles Bernstein describes as well as the broader cognitive landscapes of Moulthrop’s semantic space.</p>
<h2>Contours of Course</h2>
<p>But now that Contour has inscribed the critical landscape with both conceptual breadth and pattern precision, we can ask where it might be headed from here. How does it lend itself to analyses of texts in print? How does it resist such readings? We know that networked narratives are true topologies in that their structure moves; they can be said to make space move (and not necessarily as a literary “work in movement” in the sense of Eco’s Open Work, as Aarseth points out [<span class="booktitle">Cybertext</span> 52-53]). Aside from the odd exceptions - the cards of Marc Saporta or the confetti of William Burroughs - most narratives in print do not share this quality. If we bend back hypertextual tropes to describe pre-digital works in print (such as a novel by James Joyce), or post-digital works of print (such as a novel by Michael Joyce), we do so with this qualification in mind. That is, we need to engage with narrative topology on its own material terms.</p>
<p>In a borrowing that is noticeably scientific in nature, Joyce seizes on topology, or “rubber-sheet geometry,” to re-vision his already pliant illustrations. But, for Joyce, it is ultimately the jellyfish that best animates this gelatinous geometry. The movements of a jellyfish (at any or all points we choose to measure) are not determined by what Sanford Kwinter calls the “quantitative subspace (the grid) below it” (cited in <span class="booktitle">Othermindedness</span> 23). The jellyfish, moreover, maps the space of which it is itself substantially a part - in the literal sense, as part of the same substance - for the jellyfish forms the water and is a form of it. It illustrates a reflexive flow in topological space. It is the same space that Umberto Eco (1962), also a mentor for Joyce, describes decades prior in a parodic essay concerning the “Paradox of Porta Ludovica,” which is a purported phenomenon of urban space that leaves the inhabitants of Milan in a perpetual state of bewilderment:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">It is therefore a topological space, like that of a microbe that chooses as its dwelling place a wad of chewing gum for the period of time…in which the gum is chewed by a being of macroscopic dimensions. (<span class="booktitle">Misreadings</span> 81)</p>
<p>And it is the same space that physicist Alan Sokal, who published the infamous “pomo-babble” paper to question the credibility of the inter-disciplinary project, describes in that hoax paper as “ ‘space-time foam’: bubbles of space-time curvature, sharing a complex and ever-changing topology of interconnections” [Sokal published, “<a class="outbound" href="http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html">Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Theory</a>,” in the journal <span class="journaltitle">Social Text</span> in 1996].</p>
<p>Clearly, all three have dramatically different intentions. <cite id="note_4">In the preface to <span class="booktitle">Misreadings</span> Eco writes, “If its aim is true, [parody] simply heralds what others will later produce, unblushing, with impassive and assertive gravity” (5). The irony here of course is that Sokal’s parody, though gravely assertive in tone, was designed to disprove nothing other than gravity itself, explaining it away as just another social construction.</cite> Joyce is sincere, Eco is sincere in his parody, and Sokal is none of the above. More specifically, Joyce is sincere in his attempts to visualize topological movement in literature. He wants to describe the act of reading electronic texts as at once systematic and sensual: “Previously I have talked about the qualitative transformations in electronic texts in terms of contours, borrowing a geometric term for what I now think I have always really understood topologically, sensually (as a caress)… (<span class="booktitle">Othermindedness</span> 22). What these ostensibly diverse methodologies share is an insistence on visualizing complex, physical phenomena.</p>
<p>By mentioning Sokal I broach the broader issue of art/science border crossings, when my focus is tracing a literary trope from “static” media to digital media and (conceivably) back again; that is, I’m concerned here with the border of print/digital literature, a border that is to me more familiar but no less suspect. In the two-culture debate, there are compelling arguments on both sides and radically different degrees of borrowing. On one hand there are those “humanists” who search for metaphorical semblances in the language and logic of “science.” On the other hand, there are earnest attempts to find mimetic parallels between the two, using a language that is referential without reservation. Predictably, the most useful border crossings are made by those not seeking to dismantle or destroy one body of knowledge in order to validate another. Nevertheless, as Matt Kirschenbaum makes clear, “information technology will not - not ever - allow communication between the Two Cultures that is totally free of noise… [see “<a class="internal" href="../criticalecologies/technographic">Designing Our Disciplines</a> ” in ebr].</p>
<p>With regard to the print/digital divide, Aarseth (<span class="booktitle">Cybertext</span>) and others have identified noticeable examples of disjunction or “noise.” This said, if and how we can use hypertextual poetics to theorize works in print depends, as always, on the creativity of individual critics reading individual works, but it should appear to us more interdisciplinary than contradictory. Furthermore, with regard to metaphor, the same noise allows for unexpected synergies; old metaphors acquire new resonance. In “Beyond the Electronic Book: A Critique of Hypertext Rhetoric,” Moulthrop warns of an “absurd regression” resulting from taking a “rhetorics of integration” too far. He notes that “compensatory or reformist rhetorics take the ‘romance’ - or we might say the difference - out of hypertext” (<span class="lightEmphasis">difference</span> is Moulthrop’s word, <span class="lightEmphasis">romance</span> belongs to his source Davida Charney) (294). But Moulthrop’s examples of “too far” do not go far enough. He cites McLuhan, who observed that “rapidly changing societies tend perversely to assign new technologies the work of old, producing oxymorons like ‘televised hearings,’ ‘live recording,’ or ‘electronic book’ ” (294). Clearly, “electronic book” is an oxymoron with which the eponymous review journal is quite comfortable - not despite, but because of the new possibilities such combination allows. To see it otherwise is to ignore the extent to which the “old” rhetorics have informed what follows.</p>
<p>With regard to our trope, since Contour emerges through the tracing of an object, it is not only “what happens as we go,” but also what remains when the object is gone. As Robert Siegle writes, “Hypertext can, indeed, stimulate the ‘becomingness’ Joyce celebrates in his theory, but also, just as clearly, hypertext can facilitate retracing the shapes of what tradition and individual talents have left us” (<a class="outbound" href="http://www.thebluemoon.com/4/siegle.html">Twilit Ragas</a>). The conventional wisdom of print has never threatened to occlude the literary creativity of a digital age, and the contours of print literature will continue to inscribe the literature of hypertext. This does not inhibit innovation or postpone the emergence of what Joyce himself has called a “true electronic form” (<span class="booktitle">Othermindedness</span> 181). True forms arise whenever creative people see “embodied expression” as transparent intuition rather than contemporary theory.</p>
<p>Above all, the Contour aspires (as does this essay) to be nothing more than a site of gathering. It is a trope that forms of and conforms to the spaces in between. That said, Contour itself should be free to weave its way inter-medially, in the space of various disciplines and media. For whatever our artistic or scientific leanings, we can ultimately only work with what we can see - and feel. And I for one, despite the risks, am inclined to swim with the jellyfish.</p>
<p style="text-align:center">_________</p>
<h2>works cited</h2>
<p>Barthes, Roland. <span class="booktitle">The Pleasure of the Text</span>. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Noonday Press, 1980.</p>
<p>Bernstein, Mark, Michael Joyce, and David Levine. “Contours of Constructive Hypertexts.” ECHT, 1992 (161-70).</p>
<p>Bolter, Jay David. <span class="booktitle">Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing</span>. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 1991.</p>
<p>Eco, Umberto. <span class="booktitle">Misreadings</span>. Trans. William Weaver. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1993.</p>
<p>Joyce, Michael. <span class="booktitle">Of Two Minds</span>. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.</p>
<p>— <span class="booktitle">Othermindedness</span>. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.</p>
<p>Moulthrop, Stuart. “Beyond the Electronic Book: A Critique of Hypertext Rhetoric.” New York: ACM Press, 1991.</p>
<p>— “Where No Mind Has Gone Before: Ontological Design for Virtual Spaces.” New York: ACM Press, 1994.</p>
<p>Rosenberg, Jim. 1996. “The Structure of Hypertext Activity.” New York: ACM Press.</p>
<p style="text-align:center">_________</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/ciccoricco">ciccoricco</a>, <a href="/tags/dave-ciccoricco">dave ciccoricco</a>, <a href="/tags/michael-joyce">michael joyce</a>, <a href="/tags/mark-bernstein">mark bernstein</a>, <a href="/tags/contour">contour</a>, <a href="/tags/cycle">cycle</a>, <a href="/tags/hypertext">hypertext</a>, <a href="/tags/rhetoric">rhetoric</a>, <a href="/tags/trope">trope</a>, <a href="/tags/topology">topology</a>, <a href="/tags/moulthrop">moulthrop</a>, <a href="/tags/informand">informand</a>, <a href="/tags/rosenberg">Rosenberg</a>, <a href="/tags/episode">episode</a>, <a href="/tags/harpold">Harpold</a>, <a href="/tags/aarseth">aarseth</a>, <a href="/tags/erotic">erotic</a>, <a href="/tags/barthes">barthes</a>, <a href="/tags/eco">eco</a>, <a href="/tags/sokal">sokal</a>, <a href="/tags/two-minds">Of Two Minds</a>, <a href="/tags/othermindedness">othermindedness</a>, <a href="/tags/patterns">Patterns</a>, <a href="/tags/constructiv">constructiv</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator862 at http://www.electronicbookreview.com